Peak: Unleashing Your Inner Champion Through Revolutionary Methods for Skill Acquisition and Performance Enhancement in Work, Sports, and Life

by K. Anders Ericsson

To study this phenomenon, I and two colleagues, Paul Ward and Mark Williams, investigated how well soccer players can predict what’s coming next from what has already happened on the field. To do this we showed them videos of real soccer matches and suddenly stopped the video when a player had just received the ball. Then we asked our subjects to predict what would happen next. Would the player with the ball keep it, attempt a shot at the goal, or pass the ball to a teammate? We found that the more accomplished players were much better at deciding what the player with the ball should do. We also tested the players’ memory for where the relevant players were located and in what directions they were moving by asking them to recall as much as they could from the last frame of the video before it was hidden from them. Again, the better players outperformed the weaker ones. We concluded that the advantage better players had in predicting future events was related to their ability to envision more possible outcomes and quickly sift through them and come up with the most promising action. In short, the better players had a more highly developed ability to interpret the pattern of action on the field. This ability allowed them to perceive which players’ movements and interactions mattered most, which allowed them to make better decisions about where to go on the field, when to pass the ball and to whom, and so on.